Confined to Care: Reading Autofiction During the Danish Covid-19 Lockdowns

Abstract

This article draws on a study conducted in the last half of 2020, into the ways in which pandemic has affected the habits of Danish Readers.  Here we focus on just one phenomenon to emerge from that study:  the popularity amongst parents of autofictions that address and enact the ‘sticky’ temporality of care.  With the recent Danish novel, Olga Ravn’s Mit Arbejde in focus, we suggest that this literary representation of a new mother’s cyclical and ‘stuck’ relation to time has helped readers process their own lockdown experience.  Our case rests, however, less on the mimetic relation of the novel to life, than on the point that even when the subject of the novel suggests this correspondence, reading itself involves a certain forward movement, as well as the making of time for oneself.  

Keywords

• Pandemic Reading
• Sociology of literature
• Olga Ravn
• Autofiction
• Temporality of Care